I’m a shameless walking talking advert for anything Google. I mean Google is about the most secure high quality and free email service you can find.

So, I’m about to show you a cool trick – how to send and receive emails on a non-google email account using google email (aka gmail). This is a good idea cuz you get all the goodness of google’s other features and you keep your favoured email address. Now calm down – you don’t need to be an IT geek to do this. Really! Okay.. have a panic attack and after that settle down on this. I’ll assume you have set up and are logged into your gmail console online. Sorry – hardly anybody respectable in the real world uses email clients such as Outlook any more. Tough! You should feel ashamed of yourself – really.

Look to the extreme right of your gmail console. You should see something like that to the right. Click the settings button as shown.

Then follow the diagram below and do what it says. Hello – you don’t need to understand this. Just do! If you click something and bombs go off, I’ll take responsibility for that!

Then you do as shown below.

Then you will see this window popping up. Do as it says and as shown to the right. You double check everything and hit ‘Next Step’. How easy is that. Very!

Once you follow through, you get to the screen shot below.

I would recommend the option to click the link in the confirmation email below. I’ve used my yahoo email for this demonstration. So, I would login to my yahoo email and find the email and link sent by Google. Then I click on that link.

Let the guys do their magic. Honestly even if you understood any of this, nothing would change. I kid you not, bombs will not explode, buildings will not fall.

Once you’ve clicked that link, you will be taken back to a screen in Google that looks like this (below).

So what’s next – you’re thinking and chewing on your nails. Stop it! Now! Get back into your web console for your gmail. Click ‘Compose’ and do as shown below.

And that’s it. Questions? Post in comments below. But be very specific and clear. Don’t assume I’ll know what you mean.

Email sent directly the non-gmail account won’t reach gmail. Solution: login to your non-gmail account, select ‘options’ – then forward all emails to gmail. Easy. No – really it is very very easy to do this.